Inge Smidts and the boss outside the boardroom

The boss was in Rose Heights, then Farm Heights, then a Flow shop in Montego Bay. Inge Smidts had gone to Jamaica to spend time with the people who bought her company’s services. She sat with residents, listened to their experiences and talked to the retail team. For a chief executive responsible for markets across the Caribbean, it was a useful interruption to the usual business of being a chief executive.

She came away wanting to do more of it. In her account of the visit, the attraction was hearing customers describe things in their own words. A regional view has its uses. So does a conversation in which the person opposite you has never seen your regional view and would quite like their internet to work.

Smidts runs Liberty Caribbean, the telecommunications business previously known as Cable & Wireless Communications. Within its parent, Liberty Latin America, she is Senior Vice President, Caribbean. Her responsibilities span strategy, technology, products, sales, operations and customer service. That is a considerable distance from the neighbourhood doorstep. Her career makes more sense when you notice how often she tries to close it.

Before the cables, the shopping basket

The route began in consumer goods. Smidts spent more than a decade at Procter & Gamble, starting as an assistant brand manager and rising to lead its Benelux paper business. Her education combined a master’s in economics at UFSIA in Antwerp with an MBA in marketing at IAE in Aix-en-Provence. Economics, marketing and products bought repeatedly: a practical apprenticeship in the importance of being chosen again.

She joined Telenet in November 2009. Initially responsible for go-to-market work, she entered the executive team in October 2010 as Senior Vice President, Residential Marketing. Telecommunications introduced another kind of recurring relationship. The purchase continued long after the advertising had finished. Every bill, installation and evening spent using the connection could reopen the customer’s verdict.

By the time she moved to Liberty Global in 2015, Telenet had a product catalogue with an unusually lively vocabulary: King and Kong, Whop and Whoppa, Play and Play More. A meeting about those names must at least have been easy to distinguish from a meeting about procurement. Telenet chief executive John Porter credited Smidts and her team with introducing those products, along with Play Sports.

Her new job as Liberty Global’s chief marketing officer began on September 1, 2015. Its brief included turning customer understanding into offers that affiliates could use in their own markets. The geographical scale expanded; the intellectual problem remained recognisable. What does a person actually want, and how do you translate that into something a large organisation can deliver?

A promotion with a repair bill

In December 2017, Cable & Wireless announced that Smidts would replace John Reid as chief executive the following February. Liberty Latin America was preparing to separate from Liberty Global. She was joining a new leadership structure while inheriting a business with immediate, physical work to do.

The appointment announcement explicitly connected her arrival to rebuilding operations damaged by that year’s hurricanes. Corporate promotions usually arrive wrapped in predictions. This one also came with broken infrastructure. The customer focus she brought from marketing would have to coexist with restoration, investment and the operational realities of serving island markets.

Balan Nair, the incoming Liberty Latin America chief executive, welcomed her to the team. Chief operating officer Betzalel Kenigsztein pointed to her experience building teams and improving financial performance. Smidts’s own statement emphasised the commercial and customer perspective she would bring from Telenet and Liberty Global. The task was to make those skills useful across the whole company.

Her remit now extends from the network to the person using it. That breadth gives a customer complaint several possible addresses: product design, installation, technology, sales or support. The chief executive has to hold the pieces together. A career in marketing offers one useful discipline here: the person paying for the service experiences the result as a whole, however many departments contributed to it.

The person missing from the meeting

“The customer is your boss.”INGE SMIDTS / IN CONVERSATION WITH RED ASSOCIATES

In conversation with Tamara Moellenberg, Smidts reduced her approach to a sentence short enough to survive a strategy presentation: “The customer is your boss.” She discussed understanding people beyond the boardroom, valuing emotional intelligence in hiring and the importance of talent in making strategy work.

That is a useful description of her method, rather than a guarantee of its results. Listening becomes consequential when it changes an offer, a service decision or an employee’s ability to help. Her Jamaica visit supplies a small, concrete example of the practice: time spent with residents and shop staff, followed by a wish to repeat it in other markets.

Her public introduction on LinkedIn also begins with family: she describes herself as a mother of three and acknowledges her husband’s support. It is a modest detail beside a regional operating brief, but an illuminating choice of introduction. The executive title has to share space with the rest of her life.

A connection needs three things

Smidts also chairs the charitable foundation associated with the business. Its work supplies a particularly clear test of the word “access.” A network can pass a household while useful participation in the digital world remains out of reach. The price, the device and the ability to use it all matter.

The JUMP programme was designed around that combination. In her 2022 year-end message, Smidts described its October launch in Jamaica as providing digital access to 1,500 low-income families who had never been connected. The package combined connectivity, devices and digital training. The same year, the foundation’s Spring Golf Classic raised $450,000 for grants supporting devices, access and learning tools.

By the 2023 review, JUMP was operating in Barbados, Grenada, Jamaica and St Lucia. Government and business partners were part of the effort. Another fundraiser, organised with One Caribbean Television and GENIOX, put supporters on a racetrack with NASCAR driver Stanton Barrett and raised more than $400,000. Philanthropy had discovered an unusually literal way of accelerating its work.

The underlying idea was patient enough: removing one obstacle does little good if two others remain. For Smidts, the foundation adds a second perspective on the market she serves. It asks what happens to the people a conventional commercial offer has yet to reach, and what partnership might make participation possible.

A different name, a familiar rhythm

In May 2025, Cable & Wireless Communications announced its change to Liberty Caribbean. The corporate identity moved closer to Liberty Latin America; the enterprise business became Liberty Business. Consumer brands Flow and BTC kept their names, and customers’ service agreements and contact channels continued.

That distinction matters in a business whose relationships are local even when its ownership is international. The company described operations in more than 20 Caribbean markets. A shared corporate name could sit above brands people already knew. Alongside it came “Let Your Riddim Flow,” a campaign built around island identities, music, local partnerships and community activity.

For Smidts, this brought brand work back into view at chief executive level. Studio LC, a partnership between Liberty Caribbean and McCann Port of Spain, put Caribbean creative talent at the centre of the work. The arrangement combined people from the client and agency around the same undertaking, with Flow’s Riddim rebrand as its first mandate.

In March 2026, Studio LC received five ADDY Awards: gold for the Riddim television advertisement and silver for illustrations, the Valentine’s Day campaign, prepaid work and integrated brand identity. These were awards for the creative team’s work. Smidts’s response emphasised the people who had made it, consistent with her stated view that talent determines how far a strategy travels.

What happens after everyone is connected?

At CANTO in Nassau in July 2025, Smidts called for public-private partnerships, joint infrastructure projects and policies that could turn a regional ambition for gigabit connectivity into action. The conversation required people outside her own company: governments, regulators, other operators and technology partners. A chief executive can authorise an investment. A region’s digital economy requires rather more signatures.

By CANTO Connect in February 2026, her emphasis had moved to what connectivity should produce: jobs, services and Caribbean innovation that could scale. Her agenda linked local identity, resilient networks designed around people and the development of telecommunications businesses into technology platforms. The ambition was regional competitiveness with practical consequences for residents and businesses.

In March, she also supported Liberty Caribbean’s focus on women and girls, connecting reliable access and digital skills with opportunities to learn, work and lead. It extended the same question into another part of the customer base: who can use the infrastructure, and what becomes possible when they can?

October brought a more immediate governance task. As chair of BTC’s board, Smidts welcomed Gravette Brown as the company’s new chief executive on October 5, 2026, pointing to her commercial experience and understanding of the Bahamian market. On October 15, Smidts joined Brown’s courtesy call with Prime Minister Philip Davis by teleconference. The discussion covered connectivity across New Providence and the Family Islands, network resilience and digital inclusion. These are the less theatrical parts of regional leadership: appointing the people who will run a market, then working with the public institutions whose priorities intersect with theirs.

The thread running from the Benelux paper business to a conversation in Montego Bay is the repeated purchase, the repeated interaction, the repeated need to earn a place in someone’s day. Smidts has acquired a much larger operating brief. The doorstep remains a sensible place to test it. Whoever answers has the advantage of knowing exactly how the service felt yesterday.